


1981

by punkypeggy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asperger's Sherlock, Gen, Kid Sherlock, Mind Palace, POV Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Being Sherlock, Sherlock's Mind Palace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-18 21:59:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1444378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkypeggy/pseuds/punkypeggy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock talks about how he built his Mind Palace and why he needed a method.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1981

**Author's Note:**

> Piece inspired by the book “The curious incident of the dog in the night-time”, by Mark Haddon.

Back in 1981, things weren’t looking exactly right.

 

When you are four, you tend to see things in terms of black and white: what you cannot see does not exist, love and hate are your only two possible emotions and you hop from one to the other and back again in a minute. I was never like that. I’ve never been the crying type; on the contrary, I’ve always been extraordinarily reserved –or so the adults said. Back then, there was no diagnose other than “fundamentally flawed”, or as Nanny Anne would often say, “there’s something wrong with the little one”.

  
  
For me, things were always a bit different; even when I was what many considered “a genius”, some things escaped my grasp completely. Most humans have a variety of emotions, a display of sentiment I could never fully understand. I knew it was there, but emotions seemed confusing and unclear; people do a lot of talking without using words and the same gesture could mean so many things… My mother would always choose to get mad; she would yell and hit the furniture, sometimes clutching her head whilst asking “Why is this happening to me?” to a nonexistent interlocutor every time I did something she considered out of line. I remember wondering why anything would be happening to _her_ , in any case, it was happening to _me_. I now understand she’s always been a selfish woman. I know who I take after.

  
My brother had always been patient. I bombarded him with a million “But what does it mean?” per hour. He taught me the only way for me not to be “flawed” would be to know all the things, because if I knew how everything worked I wouldn’t be confused anymore. He taught me that if I learnt to organise myself properly by discarding everything that was not relevant and finding a system, I wouldn’t be sad and I would understand the world better. I started building what I call the “Mind Palace” on the 13th of September after reading a book about the Method of Loci that my father kept in the library.

  
Even then, classifying every gesture was complicated. I didn’t like strangers because they were hard to understand. But once you met enough people, you start noticing patterns and you can extrapolate the results. I thought emotions as a puzzle and they were no longer a problem because puzzles can be solved and I’m good at that. People would often scratch their noses when they were lying, in a subconscious attempt to divert the attention and hide themselves. Crossed arms meant the person was being defensive. Laughter then would always be nervous and forced, not genuine, even if it sounded the same. The hands were terribly eloquent. Some gestures were not found that often; Mycroft would always intertwine his fingers and rest his chin on them when he was worried –I’ve seen enough of that to know exactly what that means. He did a similar gesture when he was thinking, and I copied him: I would put my hands together as in prayer when I was focused on something and didn’t want to be bothered, talked to, or touched. In time, I would do it subconsciously when I was accessing my mental files. Some habits die hard.

  
I don’t know why anyone would care about what I’ve just written, but John insists on the fact that it’s important that people see I am not a machine; I, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. In any case, it would make people wrong and not me. I don’t mind being a machine. I wish I could upload my knowledge and my persona somewhere so people would stop bothering me. I live for the day in which we can avoid all this unnecessary social interaction. When people chat, they give out a lot of unnecessary information and it’s so annoying.

  
  
White noise. Every colour of noise.

  
What a drag.


End file.
